Eyes wide shut —

Facebook beefs up Oculus VR team in London

Facebook has quietly assembled a team of virtual reality engineers and developers in London, at least according to a pattern in employee profiles on LinkedIn.

It would appear that this is Facebook's first dedicated Oculus division based in Europe, but beyond confirming its existence, the free content ad network is keeping very quiet over the new team's purpose. In a statement to The Telegraph, a spokesperson for Oculus simply said: “We’ll have more to share on our international plans soon."

Eight members of the 12 people listed on LinkedIn as working for the Oculus team based in London have joined in the last six months, and eagle-eyed observers have noted a significant uptick in recent job ads for more developers. It all builds towards the impression that Facebook is going to make London its European Oculus hub—or at very least its first.

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Mike LeBeau, who until recently was a senior software engineer at Google, joined Oculus in January of this year, and is heading up the UK operation. According to a Facebook post he made at the time, he said: "We're going to build some really cool stuff."

"The progress and potential for virtual reality technology right now is just bananas," he added. "Oculus is right at the center of it and I’m super excited to dive in and work with this amazing team of people!"

Facebook acquired the Oculus VR platform for £1.4bn (~$2bn) in 2014, a massive purchase for a proof-of-concept built by an 18-year-old Californian student using scavenged parts in his parents' garage, even though the device had developed enough buzz to raise £1.65m (~$2.4m) on Kickstarter.

Oculus, which runs as a separate company, has offices in six US cities, as well as satellite sites in Hong Kong and Seoul. Its first headset, Rift, was released earlier this year—and Ars liked it rather a lot.

Facebook's head honcho Mark Zuckerberg has been increasingly committing his firm to virtual reality, and he's looking more and more to the UK to do it.

In May last year, Facebook acquired a British VR start-up called Surreal Vision for an undisclosed amount of money, though its team was moved to the Oculus site in Redmond, Washington. Surreal Vision made software for "real-time 3D scene reconstruction," an attempt to accurately reconstruct the real world in a virtual one using proprietary software called SLAM++.

"VR is going to be most social platform [and] we've created new teams at Facebook to build the next generation of social apps and VR," Zuckerberg has said.

According to Facebook's most recent full year accounts, published last October, the company had 494 employees on its books in the UK as of the end of 2014—doubling its headcount from a year earlier, due to growth in its engineering division.